


Five Songs They Heard All the Way Through (and One They Didn't)

by KittyViolet



Category: Excalibur (Comic), New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Against Me, Angst with a Happy Ending, Concerts, Death Cab for Cutie, Demons, Emo, F/F, Hayley Kiyoko - Freeform, Hayley Kiyoko Challenge, Inspired by Music, Limbo, Long-Distance Relationship, Long-Term Relationship(s), Multi, RPF, Sad and Sweet, Slow Build, Song Lyrics, Songfic, Straight Line Stitch, X Mansion, X-Men Gold (2017) #30
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-04-28 06:15:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14443134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Kitty and Magik hang out late at night and discover that their tunes have stories to tell.





	1. Ira Wolf, "Ruby"

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I Didn't Wash My Hands](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11813985) by [Magik3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3). 
  * Inspired by [connections](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14460513) by [Destructive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destructive/pseuds/Destructive). 
  * Inspired by [end](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15082970) by [carrionkid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrionkid/pseuds/carrionkid). 



> Set on the Days of Future Middle-Age Earth, where Kitty and Illyana get and stay together sometime after the events of current canon; otherwise canon-compliant up through XMG 30-31 (2018). All the songs are real and exist on our Earth. (Some are in links to individual chapters.)
> 
> If you're here for Katyana and only Katyana, feel free to skip to chapters 5 and 6! First four are Magik or Kitty solo adventures, with the music they're hearing as the excuse.

The X-mansion has three kitchens. This one’s on the third floor, used mostly for late night snacks, by the teachers, often in twos and threes. It is extraordinarily soundproof. In fact, almost nothing else in the world outside Avengers Mansion is soundproofed this way: Forge and Siryn collaborated a few years ago on a material that could make sound and music extra-resonant for people on the inside, and 100% inaudible for people on the outside, almost like a one way mirror, but for sound.

That’s one reason Illyana likes it: you can listen to whatever you want in there, whenever you want, and make it loud. And that’s true whether you are translating from one demonic language into another, or annotating the results for publication for an article that, when she’s done, will make sense only to four or five people in this dimension, counting herself and Stephen Strange. Fortunately all the best magic-research journals are easy to read from other dimensions: open access blue, or gold, or red.

It’s midnight. Kitty is nibbling on a crispbread (held in her left hand) while looking inside the back of the xPhone she’s been trying to rewire (with her right) so that it works in space. xPhones are like iPhones, but better; Madison Jeffries and Forge competed to build them, and Kitty (who was in space at the time) realized when she came back that rather than enter the competition from scratch, she’d rather improve the design.

Also the phone’s plugged into a (conventional; likely from Port Chester Costco) speaker. 

“This is that artist Dani told us about, from Montana,” Kitty says. “I like her voice. I was reading about this track—she’s singing about her tour van."

Or maybe she isn’t. “Ilya? Are you OK?”

Illyana is grimacing slightly. She moves her lips as if anticipating the lyrics, then gets the fierce look in her eyes that she gets when she wants to remember something, but to hold that thing at emotional length.

She looks very fierce, almost as if a greave or a breastplate were manifesting (they’re not). Then she’s fine, and looks right at Kitty. “Dani was right—she’s great—but I never really paid attention to the words before.”

Kitty listens. “I looked this one up. Is it not about her tour van? Do you have feelings about the old Blackbird?” Illyana very rarely got to ride in it, and never had to pick up pilot skills; it would be odd if she were the one to get nostalgic about a motor vehicle. 

Somebody re-starts the song. “Oh. You’re hearing—you’re thinking about Rita.”

“Right,” Ilya says. The women hold hands, hard. Kitty is stroking Illyana’s hand with her other hand; she’s managed to put down the crispbread silently by phasing it gently onto its paper towel. “You know I’m fine with hearing that part of your life, right? The parts I know, and the parts I don’t know. And if she’s back around here we can hang out. But I don’t need to meet the chickens.”

“I think she really went to California,” Illyana says. “That’s what made me see her in the song. And now I can’t not see it. It’s weird when a song’s that appropriate, isn’t it? I mean, ‘she gave me shelter,’ like literal shelter, in the country. I hadn’t lived in the country, like farms and tractors and hay, since--“

Siberia. She’s remembering Siberia. “The chickens were fun, too, for me,” Illyana continues. “They had names. Of course I miss her and want to hang out with her sometimes—“

"Of course," Kitty says. She thinks about what she knows Illyana and Spiral could do with those extra limbs, and what else they could do with the tech that Spiral knows (some of which could give them even more.... limbs). She thinks (for a moment) about whether she could compete, and then (for several happier moments) about how she knows it's not a competition: when you love someone it's cool to know what they can do. And then Kitty is thinking about the extra limbs of one particular friend she had around the Antares cluster: could she and Illyana do that, with just four limbs between them? They could, but not in the kitchen; they’d need, at the least, to visit the bedroom, to fetch the Shi’ar technology. But Kitty can let her mind go back there later. Not much later. But later. 

Illyana no longer has melancholy-face; it’s more like determined-face, serious-memory-face. “I mean, if Spiral ever comes back East.” Illyana does not add: if Spiral ever cleans up. But she knows that Kitty knows she’s thinking that too. 

“I'm here for you. And for your people, and for all the history you want to share,” Kitty says."It's OK to have mixed feelings." There is an obvious joke here about on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, but it is definitely not Kitty's to make. And the xPhone has moved on. To something LOUD.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Illyana and Rita together in this timeline, see https://archiveofourown.org/works/11813985/chapters/26654100 (Not canon, but nowhere ruled out.)


	2. Straight Line Stitch, "Promise Me"

When Ilya’s left hand clenches into a fist and parts of a vambrace start glowing from under her left sleeve Kitty gets worried very fast. Then she gets unworried; Ilya armors up a bit, often involuntarily, not only when there’s magical danger, but when she’s thinking hard about that danger, about what she’s faced, about fights she’s won.

That seems to be what’s happening here, though you’d have to know Ilya very well, almost as well as Kitty does, to know it. The Russian-American spellcaster is almost reciting the words to the song, as if part of her wanted to get up and sing along, her beautiful jaw (Kitty thinks) set in a you-will-never-defeat-us hard line, and she’s concentrating so intensely after she recognizes the song that her bluer-than-blue eyes seem, not unfocused, but focused on something quite far away. Like, outside the mansion, the county, the country, the dimension that they are (Kitty has to look around to make sure) definitely still in. She’s very much lost in a memory. What memory? Not the worst ones, Kitty hopes.

With her right hand, Illyana is making rapid gestures; a silver ring on one finger appears, then disappears, then appears again, and there’s a jet of harmless flame, and then a kind of sphere above her hand, with flames at the base. 

*

Ilya remembers that Kitty has never seen this band before she remembers why: Ilya saw them in San Francisco, while Kitty was insubstantial, isolated, in space. 

That was before the brig, before the military adventures in Limbo, before Pixie had to go get her (hard to believe how close Ilya and Pixie are now; it sure took a while), when living on the West Coast was still a melancholy novelty. 

It was pretty common for the younger mutants to sneak out and go to concerts; if you were a teacher you’d want to check concert listings, which was how Ilya learned that Straight Line Stitch were coming to Oakland.

And that was how Ilya learned just how much she had in common with Alexis Brown. The two voices coming from one throat, the energy and the intensity that Ilya recognized as what you get when you fight with a demon, the transformation of remembered pain into something thrilling and terrifying, something that comes from the back of the throat and the base of the lungs, something whose scarlet force can knock down walls— 

Ilya recognized all of it, back then, on Utopia, just from the CD—she used it for exercise— and she had her suspicions, and she wondered whether any of the mutant musicians could hear it too, but she didn’t really want to tell them: Alison would just get super-jealous, and Lila would shrug, and neither Sean nor Theresa would understand this kind of music at all, though it did exist in Ireland. There was no one to ask other than the singer herself. Ilya would have to go to the show.

Bottom of the Hill was already a legacy club in the early 2000s; it’s pretty unprepossessing, though there is a neon sign above the door, shaped for some reason like a big floppy boot. Headlining, Straight Line Stitch had attracted maybe 200 people, in a club built to hold more, with bronze fixtures and copper wire decor—like, a lot of copper wire, exposed uninsulated wire, tied into strange shapes that couldn’t be part of a normal rock club look.

Magik remembered looking at the strands and tangles of wire around the stage while waiting for the band to start, placing her pint glass of ice water (it was a hot club) down very close to one of them, and seeing the water start to boil away; bits of armor began to appear on her fingers, too...

It wasn’t danger she sensed, though; it was protection. This band, or somebody in it, had magical enemies; they had to perform under a protection spell. Or spells: the knotted copper wire on the balcony must have been strung up during the soundcheck to keep the spell in place.

Ilya cast additional wards to protect the audience—the maroon-and-gold haze of the finger-work taking effect would look like just a trick from the colored stage light— and then turned her full attention to the five people on stage, and then to just one. Because Alexis Brown had clearly survived a great raw slice of her lifetime somewhere else. Somewhere with demons and flames and marauding lizards; somewhere that baseline humans could not go, unless they were brought there or dragged there. 

The dreadlocks, swinging as she growled and then falling straight against her back as she stood upright to warble and belt and insist on the truth—the dreadlocks looked almost like they held the memory of horns. What kind of fighting technique did those knees and elbows remember? What disabling kick, what pivot, in those legs, in those black tennis shoes? What spell in the black opal armband, sending its Morse code dots, its tiny starscapes, scattered as the singer strode in and out and half-out of a spotlight?

And that was just the stage presence: there were the songs. The songs. The songs.

“Don’t be afraid of the dark,” means one thing in a lullaby, another in “Taste of Ashes,” when there’s an explosion going on behind the melody, and another still when you had to wait so long for any melody at all. When there was something else in you growling back at you, something that wanted to throttle your enemies and burn them forever in coals to get back at them for what they did to you.

The two-fisted approach, the way that this singer leapt out at the audience, then doubled back in a fighting pose, during “Black Veil,” while the machine-gun drums kept going off; it was like she was saying she had the spellwork, the agility, the awareness, to win a fight against literal machine guns, against a hostile army, against the army of ideas that told her a person like her can’t exist, does not deserve to exist. I’m here and I control my own space and I’m going to keep it that way, her shoulders said. I go where I say I can go.

The opal armband sent its glints over the dozen kids in the mosh pit, the dozen in the balcony, the rest of them, like the constellation Orion, come down to Earth to defend the living and the resurrected against the less-than-human, the already dead.

The protective spells, the defensive presence, the unearthly mien, the double-voiced self-defense: it was so familiar. Too familiar. 

Alexis Brown had escaped from Limbo too.

But it was the next song that hit Illyana hardest, or rather lifted her up, reminded her why she couldn’t be on Utopia tonight, studying or mapping or on guard duty, why she had to be here.

“This is the last day with you. The last day, no matter what I do or say. There’s nothing in the world that can change this. No regrets.”

Illyana couldn’t conjure up an acorn. That wasn’t her magic. It never would be. She’s no gardener.

But she rarely goes more than a day and a night without remembering how it felt when she conjured her sword. Her own sword, her own magic. Her way to get out.

Was Alexis Brown’s voice like her soulsword? A thing from two worlds, a blessing-curse, a weapon, a thing that came from the worst place for the best reasons, the thing that once manifested let her shift from a me, a myself, to whom things were done, into someone who chose what to do, into the full uprightness of being an “I”?

Did she sing her way out of Limbo?

Ilya remembers that it was during “Promise Me,” or maybe during “Black Veil,” that a couple of older men with a kind of blue cast to their skin and shiny jackets decided to leave the club. Of course they were demons; of course they had been forced out once the full protective magic kicked in.

Everybody still in the club—most of them humans, a few not—felt welcome, and they were all hearing what they needed to hear, especially once the song shifted back to the melody this band used only for the chorus: “all you angels,” she was singing, “tell me that you’ll always find a way. Promise me. Promise me.” 

Angels, as “Promise Me” had it, weren’t angels in any particular Heaven, any more than they were a rich morose blond dude with wings. They were messengers and protectors. They were what you could be once you could sing yourself out of hell. It’s not a song about saving yourself, or losing yourself, so much as a song about what you can do once you’ve already saved yourself; you can use your voice to save others. You can also use your spellwork. Or your sword.

And yes, you are going to get sucked back into the dark sometimes, because Limbo is something you never fully control even if you’ve been its rightful ruler. And you know you can get back out, because you’ve done it before. Limbo itself contains the tools you can use to save yourself, and others, from Limbo. Sometimes the tool is a sword; sometimes it’s a scream.

Some fans were trying to press past Illyana to get to the front of the stage, the knot of thrashers there more to slam into one another than to hear the thunderous drums. One of the fans, Ilya realized, wasn’t a fan, nor a human, nor a mutant; this oddly skinny figure in a leather jacket got skinnier as he approached Alexis Brown, turning almost into a kind of poleaxe, ready to launch himself at the singer. Whatever pocket of Limbo Brown had escaped from still wanted her back. 

Screw that. Magik manifested her full soulsword, sliced the demon-poleax-kidnap spell into what looked a lot like a foot-tal stack of pastrami, then turned her attention back to the song.

Shouty growly voice from the verses: “You can’t change this. No regrets.” And then the melody again: “Tell me that you’ll always find your way. Promise me. Promise me.”

Illyana recognized the singer's look; her eyes, scanning the ceiling for winged marauders, scanning the crowd for people like her. Her very presence in this world was an example, and a stick in the eye to people who thought you couldn’t do anything good once something that bad had happened to you. Part of this singer would always be in whatever pit she remembered, just like part of Ilya would always be able to look back to those terrifying cliffs, to the unearthly snow, to the oak that was ash, to the vile faux-help she used to get from S’ym.

Her soulsword wouldn’t be so sharp if it didn’t have darkness within it, and if it weren’t so sharp it couldn’t protect this world against the others that would harm it. But it is, and it does, and it can. Ilya can’t save everyone—it hurt so much when she couldn’t save Kitty from space, when Magneto had to do it himself. But she can save some people, sometimes. If she had to, she could do it again and again. Illyana would always find her way. For herself, for Kitty, for the kids too (even for the kids who hated her). But, also, for Kitty.

Back in the mansion, in the present day, on the third floor, at the table with Kitty, the xPhone still open at the back, the song ends. Ilya still has a tiny flaming sphere suspended, levitating, above her right hand. On the last chord it morphs into a ball of stars. 

“I love that band now,” Kitty says. “I remember when you were so into metal and I was like ‘OK, that’s your thing; it’s not mine.’ And now—“

“Da?” Ilya says.

Their eyes meet; their hands touch. Ilya brushes her fingertips over the clear polish on Kitty’s fingernails, notices one of them slightly singed from wires. “I think it's also kind of sometimes mine. ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't look online for a video of "Promise Me"; the only one easy to find is a terrible live version. Use streaming audio instead for the studio version. ("Black Veil" is easy to find, though, and there is a video.)
> 
> As usual, please alert me to anything canon-inconsistent, especially in the flashback.


	3. Against Me!, "333"

The next one’s loud, too, and starts with several earthquakes’ worth of drum rolls. Then there’s a voice, a righteous snarl, invoking “reasons to be fearful.” Kitty stops tinkering and pays close attention as the chorus kicks in.

“Don’t we know this singer?” Kitty says. “I mean, I’m pretty sure you've brought her up-- isn't she a friend of Anna Maria's? Isn’t it--”

“Laura,” Illyana says. “No, not Wolverine! Laura Jane.” Illyana stops for a minute and realizes that the two Lauras probably have a lot in common. The younger one, Wolverine, is definitely a fan of the older one. “Laura Jane Grace. From Florida. We met through O.Z.”

Kitty was not on Earth when Illyana met Laura Jane Grace; Kitty was having a very bad day that felt like twenty years, or maybe two years that felt like a day, melded to a giant bullet, in space. 

O. Z. is a private detective, a friend of Alison’s, who sometimes calls for help with the demons and villainous schemes of north Florida (there are a lot of them in Florida). 

Last time he called the away team was Rogue and Illyana, and the problem looked clearly sorcerous; dozens or hundreds of many-winged, many-limbed beasts eating pets, breaking windows, and menacing civilians all around a newly manifested mutant in Gainesville.

By the time Illyana and Anna Maria got there, though—Rogue flew them both, at top speed; they ended up touching down hard on a grassy field on a college campus—the problem looked mostly solved: there were demons, shimmery horned spiky hurts-to-see demons, but they were seated, or crouched or perched, in a circle, apparently harmless, listening to a tall woman with pale skin, broad shoulders, tight blue jeans, long hair, an acoustic guitar, and a sleeve of interlocking tattoos, as she sang at the top of her lungs and played, or bashed, or fought her way through, the chords to the song.

The woman was standing on a metal folding chair. The demons were circling, slowly, without getting closer, not so much afraid of her as careful around her, half in awe. She looked like someone who works out; like someone who could lift up a moped or two, if not a motorcycle. 

She also looked, as Illyana approached her, tired, not in her legs—she looked comfortable standing—but in her throat, her shoulders, her lips. She had been singing for quite some time.

If she stopped singing, would the demons attack? Would they disperse and start menacing random Floridians?

She couldn’t keep singing forever. Rogue nodded; Illyana gestured, a portal glowed gold, and the demons fell, one after another, sideways through the air and into Limbo, greeted by a wicker cage. The portal snapped closed behind them, sending afterimages, brighter than glowworms, every which way through the midday air.

“Thank you,” the tall lady rasped, making as if to sit on the folding chair, then kicking it over instead. “That was—a lot.”

“How long had you been singing, sugar?” Rogue asked. She was really concerned.

“An hour, tops?” the tall lady said. “I’ve done longer shows, by far, but not for this audience. Tough crowd.”

“The minute they stopped listening,” Illyana remarked, in case Rogue didn’t quite realize it, “they would have flown away and started eating people. You saved some lives.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” the singer said as she put the guitar in a case. “I don’t know if or what you drink, but can I at least get you a cup of tea? I live maybe a half mile from here.”

The case had a very faded circle-A anarchy sticker, another with red spikes all over a map of Florida, and a brand new shiny one: black X in a circle on a yellow background, a cross or plus sign pointing out of the circle at 6:00, and arrows pointing out at 10 and 2. It was probably safe to go where the singer led.

*

“I’m Laura Jane.” Was the rasp in her voice always there? Did it come from years of smoking, or from hours of singing, or from her powers emerging? What were her powers, anyway? Demon-taming? Guitar tuning? Rapid tea-making? “The place is a mess, I know. I kind of rushed out when I heard what was happening.” 

The flat was tiny, and yes, a mess- bras on top of the bookshelves, a skillet with a fried egg still on the stove— but the tea and the teapot were perfect. Black, with pomegranate notes. (There was a tea much like that you could use in a spell, but this tea was for drinking. Probably.)

“I bet O. Z. called you. I know him, too! He tracked down our van when it got stolen in Tallahassee. I don’t know whether he likes our music but he comes to our shows and has a good time. I mean, as much as anybody has a good time.”

Laura Jane’s power was turning pain into song; the more pain in the air around her, the more powerful the song. She thought she could handle her powers by starting a band, at first a band in name only, with lots of shouting and percussion that sometimes consisted of overturned buckets. Singing before an audience made her feel better except when it made her feel a lot worse; she was processing too much emotion at once. It’s better now, she explained, not so much because they’ve got a proper rock format, though they do, but because she’s figured out how to channel the pain, like a horn player’s circular breathing.

Illyana nodded, remembering how long it took her to manifest her soulsword, how long it takes to control power that comes from pain.

Rogue said “I’ve heard you on the radio, sugar! You are—well, you’re a bit intense for me.”

“College radio,” Laura Jane said. Rogue nodded. The band was taking off. No wonder Laura Jane looks tired, Illyana taught; when she’s not recording or on a regional tour (still using the van O.Z. recovered), she’s using her power locally, a friendly neighborhood empathic channeler, except not so friendly at times. People in the Gainesville circuit (Laura Jane explained) know she’s somebody to call about domestic violence—the more pain in the air, the more she can turn her song into a force that focuses shame on the shameless, or—if she wants—into a physical force, a shockwave that can send a bad actor reeling and out the door. The same empathic power, pain into sound or song, can calm pets, or help people having panic attacks, or direct marchers in protests. 

It is an exhausting way to live, Laura Jane explained; it’s like having three jobs at once. But she absolutely would not trade it.

“I know the feeling,” Rogue said, frowning, placing a gloved hand on Laura Jane’s bare hand.

The worst thing about it, Laura Jane continued, is that way that her power is always placing her in between people who want to do harm and the people they want to harm. Both sides have pain, but just one—at most—has to get hurt. It took her a while to figure that out. It’s still hard.

“If you know O.Z.,” Illyana said, looking around warily—could a demon have followed them home?—“you might know our friend—colleague—Alison?”

Laura Jane smiled. When she started singing Alison Blaire was the kind of musician Laura Jane would never have wanted to be compared to, not in a million shows: Dazzler was a disco queen, a sellout, a spangly Hollywood girl, amoral to the core. She's less judgey now.

“We’ve met,” Laura Jane said. Illyana, showing her comfort, placed a knee-lenth black boot on a packing crate, leaning back slightly. No soulsword needed here.

Rogue was still, understandably, worried for Laura Jane. Is this a life she can keep on living? Is it the life she wants? Do you—Rogue asked—ever learn the source of the pain? Do you—Rogue slowed down; she’s asking about herself, really—have to take their thoughts into your own?

“Sometimes I do.” The question made Laura Jane uncomfortable; she began reaching around the salvaged brick and board shelves for what? a cereal box? no, behind the cereal box: for a green mandolin. “The mindreading has been there for years off and on. I can’t really—OH.”

Laura Jane leaned forward, so that her dyed red hair fell around her face, and looks right at Illyana, mouth not quite closed. It was intense. Rogue looked at them both, said “Laura Jane, we have a lot to talk about-- I'll surely be in touch. But I think the two of you might want some time alone.” The mutant in green yanked open the living room window, added “I’ll meet you where we landed, in an hour!” and flew out into the blue sunny day.

Did Rogue think Illyana and Laura Jane were going to hook up? It’s not an entirely silly idea: Illyana hadn’t thought of it till now, but she could almost see it—the powerful posture, the strong hands, the empathetic eyes, the alertness, her hips on her hips—what would Laura Jane be like in bed, beneath her? Or would Illyana end up beneath Laura? The singer would be considerate but forceful, with flashes of sublimated anger turned into joy, fierce changes of direction… what kind of toys would be her favorite toys? Did that alcove behind the shutter work as a bedroom? Was that a toy by her pillow, a strap by her bed? Would she kick, when she--

“Oh. No. You don’t—you do.” Laura Jane sat back in her chair now, almost overwhelmed; the state that Illyana and Rogue had both taken for something like being turned on, or being interested in Illyana, was really something more like an extreme receptivity, taking in some of the Russian mutant’s experience. Some of the Russian mutant’s pain.

“You’ve been to the worst place,” Laura Jane said, taking mandolin in hand. Her speech slowed down considerably, as if the rest of her brain were doing something else. “Nobody knows all the things that you have been through. And then you found your best friend. You were separated, a lot. And now you can’t find her. She might be gone forever. And you want to know whether I want to come back with you to New York? 

“I don’t. I have friends here. What I want is to go on tour with new songs. You have so much pain, especially now. I can see what you’re supposed to look like and it keeps changing—visible mutations fading—Illyana, Illyana—“ Laura Jane took the Russian woman by the hand, imploringly, suddenly, vulnerably—were they going to kiss? No, the musician wanted something else—“Can I write you a song right now, a song for you to sing if you sang instead of" (she pauses) "fighting? Then you can go, I’ll be fine, I know where to find you, we can even hang out with Anna Maria or whoever next time we come up north, but you have so much pain going on—I need to do this right now. Can you, like, have another cup of tea, or something, first?”

An hour later Illyana let Rogue pick her up and sweep her back into the sparse clouds for the flight home. A week later, in those years before audio files could be easily sent online, a CD came in the mail with O. Z.’s office as the address, and the band name on the front. 

The song was called “333”—half of 666, for a child of Limbo whose other half had been taken away?—and Laura Jane’s powers had written the song for them both: it was a song about long need and small hope, a song for someone to sing who had seen worlds end, a song for someone who really had seen all the devils to sing to a girl who had only seen some of them, a song about “visible mutations fading” (that line was in the second verse), a song about being in pain from the past and wanting somebody back. “All the devils you don’t know,” Laura sang on Illyana’s behalf, “came on along for the ride. I wanna be as close as I can get to you.”

*

At the time, that wasn’t very close. It was parsecs away. Maybe light-years away. "I wanna be as close as I can get" was almost the saddest thing that Illyana could say about her best friend, her once and future gf.

But now— here they were.

Illyana squeezes Kitty’s very material hand and keeps squeezing until Illyana realizes that her partner’s other hand is no longer on the table; it’s between Illyana’s thighs. The Russian mutant slides herself back and forth slowly along Kitty’s hand, starting something they both hope will take a while. They are going somewhere together tonight. But slowly. They have all the time in the world. Was Kitty already wearing something they could use, later tonight? What was that Illyana saw, that artificial ridge, like a slender metal rod wrapped around Kitty's left thigh? The dark-haired mutant leaned in toward her friend, hair falling into her face, this time-- unlike Florida-- really wanting a kiss.

Something is sparking from the xphone, though. And something else is boiling on the stove. As in boiling over. The energy, the pleasure of their being there together won’t dissipate. But it may have to wait a song or two.


	4. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"

“Bad timing,” says Kitty. “Da,” Illyana nods. Kitty throws a spoon across the kitchen so that it clatters against the stove, ricochets, turns the kettle off.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Ilya says before she can stop herself, and then they both say at once, softly, “Japan.”

“It’s like an Irish coffee,” Illyana says, rising to pick up the tea, pour the tea into thick glasses over ice, and add a shot’s worth of bronze liqueur from a green flask. “Except not Irish, and not coffee. Also not Russian. I invented it.” Did she close the flask with her tail?

“Better that way,” Kitty agrees, intertwining the wires correctly this time, the ones she got wrong a moment ago. The back of the phone—the special part, the one that baseline humans’ phones don’t have—is probably fixed now; she’s going to wait to test it out. The part that plays music is working fine, playing something much quieter now.

Their glasses clink. What’s inside the glasses glows. The last time she had this particular flavor, this particular mild warmth inside, from her hips to her collarbones—X-Haven, wasn’t it? Isn’t this Neverbrod, oleaster liqueur, found and stored almost exclusively in Limbo? Illyana has been keeping some of it there...

We make up our own traditions, Kitty thinks. But we don’t make them up from scratch. We adapt what we get, what we inherit, what we see. True for mixed drinks. Also for romance. Also for—anything, really. Her mind wanders to Ian Hacking, to engineering, back to the woman in front of her, to the various directions in which sparks can fly.

“This guy sounds very—“ Illyana says.

“Familiar? As in, we’ve heard his voice in the mall.”

“Chamber was really into him. Or them. Oh.” Now she’s quiet. She’s picked up on some of the words.

Kitty gets quiet too. Now they’re holding hands, tenderly, loyally, not leading to anything hotter or more urgent, or not yet.

“Don’t tell me,” says Ilya, “you’ve met this guy. Don’t tell me he’s a mutant too.”

“I’ve never met him. But this song was really popular when—when you were.... not here. I used to hear it and think it was written for me. For me to sing to you.”

It makes sense, almost too much sense. "If heaven and hell decide/ That they both are satisfied." That must mean: if you die and go to Limbo. If you die or get stuck in Limbo. Again. "If there's no one beside you/ When your soul embarks..." 

“Like that other song, but in reverse, and not on purpose. Like some cosmic force had made sure that you had a song to sing for me. If I ever got lost in Limbo and didn't come back. If I--”

“Yeah.”

“You know I would find my way back as soon as I could. When I could,” Illyana says. Something like silver sparks, like bits of chain mail, flicker momentarily around her clavicle, on the bones of one wrist. “I’d never make you follow me.”

“I would, though.” Does this guy with the flat voice, who sounds like he wants to appeal to everybody and their uncles and aunts, this guy who can’t possibly be singing just to people like Kitty and her friend—does he understand her too? How she missed her best friend in the years when her friend went away, when her friend (age-reverted, without the same memories) had died, wrenchingly, surrounded by useless Shi’ar technology, read to by Jubilee? How she missed her, felt for her, later, when her friend had to go back to Limbo, so as not to spend the rest of her days in a body that felt like Hell? 

How she would have done anything. Including things that Magik would have prevented her from doing. Did prevent her from doing.

How a true friendship—whether or not you’re sleeping together, whether or not you’re together forever, whether or not you have rings—doesn’t just mean you sacrifice yourself for your friend; it also means you sometimes have to stop your friend from giving it all up for you.

“I used to imagine singing this song to you, when I was on Earth and you weren’t,” Kitty says. “And now we’re here. Thank"-- who to thank?-- "I mean, we're here.”

“It’s a funny song.”

“Funny how?” Kitty asks.

“The places we stay in Limbo?” Illyana says. “Like, when we’re there? Like, X-Haven?”

“Yes?”

“Can you imagine a vacancy sign?”

“With maid service,” Kitty says.

“Room service.”

“Fresh hot towels.”

“Made from the skins of our enemies.”

“Soft, fuzzy skins.”

"European plugs, or North American?"

"I'd bring all kinds of plugs, just to be safe."

“I'll pack. Do they take reservations?”

“They do, but you pay by the hour.”

“I don’t have a problem with that.” Illyana reaches, playfully, for the xPhone, which could, after all, dial any number on Earth, and several in space. But the melancholy baritone is over. Something else, something agitated, excited, familiar, almost too familiar, has begun.


	5. Hayley Kiyoko, "What I Need"

Sometimes you have to push your best friend pretty far; otherwise she’ll never know how she feels. And you can never be sure.

Sometimes there’s something that makes you you— that constitutes part of yourself— and it’s also something you need to get over, to compensate for, to learn how to work around.

For Illyana, that means the conviction she’s already damned, that whatever goes wrong is her fault, that she’s done the wrong thing even when she’s done it right.

For Kitty, for much of her life, it’s been her conviction that she has to keep her promises no matter what: that—because other people believe in her—she has to keep on being who they want her to be.

And sometimes there’s a song that helped you become who you are, a song that said everything for you at the right moment, and there is no way the singer intended for the song to mean those things; the singer, the songwriter, never had any idea. 

The minute this particular number kicks in Kitty feels as she felt years and years ago; she’s back on the roof of Harry’s Hideaway, after sundown on a moonless, windy night, Illyana beside her, an entire bottle of champagne, half-drunk, in her very solid hand. 

It’s a banger, this song, but the memories that come with it have nothing to do with going out clubbing, and connect themselves only in an odd, indirect way to the dancefloor, because there was a dancefloor, throbbing to this tune’s beat, two stories below the two of them. On the dancefloor, still: their older friends, their X-friends, the people who brought them up, who had their backs, dancing, unconcerned.

“All that back and forth getting complicated, running me around got me frustrated, no: that’s why I’ve been laying low...” 

“You always were a bad influence, Rasputin.”

Kitty remembers saying that. Just kidding. Not kidding.

“I’m totally happy,” Illyana responded, a couple of conversation-beats along. 

To which Kitty had said: “And not a great actor.” Because that was where the song’s chorus kicked in, and Kitty could see exactly how the breakaway hit of 2018 had affected—no, confirmed; solidified; put a big gold star sticker on—her friend’s mood.

Because what the singer—surely not another mutant; surely not a telepath?—was saying was exactly what Illyana was thinking, what she was trying and failing not to say with her posture, with all of her facial features, with the rooftop wind all over her hair.

“What I need, what I need, what I need, is for you to be sure. What I need, what I need, what I need, is to tell me that it’s yours. And who you do it for.”

“Please don’t make me say this,” Illyana had said. 

“Not a metaphor but it really could be,” Hayley Kiyoko sang. “I am putting on a show.”

And the song went on. Illyana has heard it so many times since: “The way that I love there’s no taking my place. Staring at you right in your face. Don’t look away no more.”

And there it was. What Kitty and Piotr had was real. It was strong. But it wasn’t the same as wanting to make a life together. It wasn’t, even, a project that could last their whole lives, the way that raising kids together could be a project, or building a school was a project, or science-ing all day and night, like Madison had with his semi-secret boyfriend. (Could you have multiple lifelong projects? Some people could. But Kitty and Peter—they weren’t one.) 

If she married Piotr tomorrow, it would be all about trying to keep her promises to her past, about what she felt she had to do for him, because he would die for her, had died for her, had tried several times to die for her, and she for him, and because she had a huge—albeit off-and-on—screen crush on him, when they were both high school age. It wouldn’t be what she wanted for her future, or even right now, despite whatever chemistry anybody else still saw.

And Illyana could see that. Had seen that for most of the time that she had been alive, or at least for her time on this Earth. 

And she knew something else, something you can learn just by staying close friends with the people you knew in your teens (and, also, by fighting by their side): it is a terrible idea to stay, forever, with no breaks and no experiments, with your first serious secret girlfriend, the one you chose, who chose you, in your teens. Couples like that only get together, stay together, and feel like they’re meant to be together, if they first get space to experiment. 

And Kitty—science girl that she was—had run experiments. She had run one to see whether she shared the widely noted X-masculine preference for redheads, and another to see whether her sexuality was actually girls and/or people named Peter. And another, more than once, in which she just wasn’t dating anyone; there was too much else—too much engineering, too much saving the world—that had to come first.

As for Illyana—had she run any experiments? Fewer than Kitty, at that point. Not into guys, unless she could shape her own body so that she herself got to be one. (And Kitty would be OK if she were.) There had to be experiments in her future, more than there had been in her past. 

If she were to make it all crystal-clear to Kitty now—the way their feelings were still their feelings, the way Illyana knew about at least one possible future for the two of them, one that looked a lot like their shared past—if Ilya told Kitty everything, it would cause an unbelievable cosmic train wreck. Cosmic, for real. As in, Kitty would f*ck off to space and never come back.

But she couldn’t say nothing. Kitty could read her too well.

“I think it’s been years on and off between you two. You know what I mean. I just think if you two were meant to be together... it would have happened by now.”

And if Colossus-and-Kitty were meant to be, Kitty would have said so right away. She would say something about how she had been thinking the same thing, but now she had figured it out. 

There absolutely had to be Earths where Kitty and Piotr were truly meant to get together and stay together at last, whatever it meant for the Kitty-and-Ilya friendship. (There was no universe in which they couldn’t be friends.)

And, also, there had to be Earths where Kitty decided that it would be fun to go back to Pete Wisdom in England, and universes where she stayed at Chicago and built her own academic career, and terrible ones in which Kitty was forever the pawn of a mind-controlled Courtney Ross.

But there also had to be an Earth where—but if that was the future that Illyana wanted, she had to say nothing about it now. Or just to apologize. What she needed, she realized—what Kitty needed for herself—was to be sure.

Presumably whatever was going on underneath them, on the dancefloor, involved an extended remix, or else these few minutes of conversation—they felt like hours, so consequential—really were nothing but the length of a long pop song, its chorus coming around one more time.

“What I need, what I need, is for you to be sure. And to tell me that it’s yours. And who you do it for.” And who you do it for.

The wind blew Kitty’s hair into hooks like dragons’ tails against the distant stars.

“I’m sorry,” Illyana said. “I’m a terrible friend. And an even worse person.... I love you. And I’m sorry.”

The angle of their embrace made it impossible for Illyana to see the expression on Kitty’s face that matched what she said next: “It’s okay. It’s totally okay.”

But the Russian magic-user didn’t need to see.

*

Kitty is crying, a little. “Don’t worry,” she said. “A little salt water won’t hurt an xPhone.”

“Not even one with exposed wires out the back?”

“Not these wires.” From the expression on Kitty’s face Ilya can tell she was almost done with whatever marvel of engineering she had been trying to complete. Something like a spark, or an eyeblink, flickers in silver from the back of the xPhone.

“Memory foam,” Kitty says. “I feel like I’ve just been shot with a cannon that shoots memory foam.”

“Shot out of a cannon?” Illyana says.

“Like a rocket," says Kitty. ("Bleep. Eep," says the phone, maybe in between songs.) 

“I know. That song,” Magik says. “And the one before that, and the one before that. You know all those special X-playlists the junior faculty have been concocting?”

“Megan made us two hours of punk and new wave sung in Welsh. I’m still recovering from all the wwww’s, h’s and lllll’s.”

“There’s no way someone made us one of those playlists, is there?”

“Who would know enough about us both to put these songs together? I mean—“

“Storm would know. But she wouldn’t have made that playlist.”

“A couple of red-haired telepaths. One in particular. But I feel like Rachel would have asked permission before making something this personal.”

“So this is an algorithm? Because these songs are freaking reading our minds.”

“I can read your mind.” Kitty squeezes Illyana’s hand, and then Kitty feels.... something that wasn’t there before, between her legs. Something physical, or a vibration, or something that came to her from some other plane? It’s a good feeling, anyway. Pretty soon they’ll address it.

First, however, there is an electronic musical mystery to be solved.


	6. Hayley Kiyoko, "Sleepover"

“Eep,” says the xPhone speaker. “Gol-eep,” and then a few blips, and a soft, almost wary harmony, synthesized strings under acoustic guitar, with a hint of birdsong.

“I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it...”

“Oh,” says Illyana. “This.”

“It came out right at the same time as that other song about wanting to be sure,” Kitty says. “I remember hearing it that summer and it was like—“

“It was like traveling back in time.”

“Not literally.” (Both women are in a position to know.)

“Right. I mean—that was how it felt just before—“

“Before we kissed,” says Illyana. They’re holding hands again. “The first time we lived together. After, but before. When I knew how I felt but I didn’t know the social cues, and didn’t know if you felt—“

“The same way,” Kitty says. “Hearing this song right now feels like—like we’re living in two or three times at once.”

Kitty remembers discovering what Illyana was doing with herself, for herself, under the covers, back when they were first roommates, and then discovering that both girls had been thinking about each otther while they were doing it. So long ago and yet not long at all. She remembers the late night runs, the embarrassment leading to blushes and pleasure, the sock on the door that could point left or right. And she remembers hearing this song for the first time, long after their teen years but close enough (they would always be close enough) that the uncertainty was still a fresh memory: especially that year, after that conversation on the roof of Harry's Hideaway, just then.

It’s a song about how it feels when all the feelings of bodily pleasure seem new, and you don’t know how far, or how often, or how deeply, your best friend would like to share them with you; you don’t know if she still thinks about you that way, always, or ever, or only some of the time.

Now they know. Kitty remembers finding out, not once but over and over.

Her body remembers it too; her body feels impatient, right now, and ready to prove it again. She's wearing something that could help her prove it, and fast: not the sheer blue skirt, not the darker blue leggings (why did she dress for today like it was an Excalibur mission? because she owns lots of blue?), but what’s under the skirt, and under the leggings. It’s silvery, shimmery, semi-solid Shi’ar technology, the pelvic harness Ilya suggested they wear this morning but hasn’t done anything with yet, the tech that flows around the wearer’s hips, and between her thighs, and sometimes fits inside her, adapting- when it's activated-- to the wearer’s body heat, and the wearer's blood flow, and posture, and wishes, and mood.

It has been, slowly, adapting as she remembers the sleepovers, the nights in the same bed not knowing what else she wanted from her best friend, all the way back them, and then the nights and mornings, staying in bed, sometimes phasing and sometimes staying very solid, and finding out.

Kitty is lost in thought; her right hand has been wandering away from the phone, the speakers and the wires, down towards her thighs.

Illyana raises one eyebrow—she has always been able to do that—and smiles, almost smirks, and then really does smirk, and grips Kitty’s left hand harder and harder, as the technology flows and grips between her hips harder and harder, like she’s been waiting for that feeling all the time they’ve been in the kitchen together, or possibly all day, or all year.

The song hits a chorus. “At least I’ve got you in my bed.”

Illyana has Kitty, now, again, in their bed. Or in this case in the school's most private kitchen. It feels even better, now that they can be sure. And there are still surprises. The alien tech helps.

And, suddenly, Kitty is full of—that’s not quite right, but it’s hard to know how to say it, and Kitty doesn’t even want to say it; the harness, still out of view, is expanding inside her, pushing against her inner thighs, her clit, her inner walls, warm and wet, and even if she wanted to try to say how it feels, she couldn’t say. The harness gets softer, expanding, holding her, almost rocking her back and forth as she looks into Illyana's eyes and then closes her own eyes. It takes all the oxygen in her very physical very solid—but, also, liquid—body not to cry out, and then she does cry out, sharply, with pleasure, and almost falls out of her seat as the harness vibrates inside her, in and out and warm and back and forth, and the muscles inside her flex with remembered pleasure, the same and yet different, all-new and uncanny, astonishing, each time.

Illyana knows exactly what’s going on, and gives her best friend time, and then, carefully, deliberately, lets go of Kitty’s hand. She stands up and takes off her own jeans—black jeans, newly washed—and moves to straddle Kitty.

Illyana’s own silver harness is throbbing and growing: something smooth is growing out of it, growing out from between her hips, looking for someone to enter, some way to play.

Kitty, however, hasn’t finished coming for the first time. “Oh!” she says—her own harness hasn’t finished with her: it’s still throbbing inside her walls—and as she loses control, just a little, her forearm sweeps over the table and knocks the xPhone away from its speaker, onto the floor, just before “Sleepover” is over. Then Kitty phases through the chair, slides backwards, and ends up on the kitchen floor, on her butt and then on her back, her head on top of a towel. 

It’s a good thing she knows how to fall; otherwise she’d say “ow!” or “ouch!” or “yikes” or at least think it. Instead she says “Oh!” one more time, because no sooner is she fully solid on the floor than Illyana is over her, on top of her, the silver harness fully extended, both of them held together by love, by their arms and shoulders, by their hips sliding, one over another, and by their harnesses, which have become one silver, soft but solid harness, merged completely, so that there’s something throbbing inside each woman, rhythmically aligned.

They move back and forth, one woman on top of the other, in the corner of the very private kitchen—not that they’d notice if anybody walked in, not that Illyana cares much, but nobody does. Illyana is penetrating Kitty in exactly that way that Kitty wants to be penetrated, and nobody is penetrating Illyana-- it's more like the harness is outside and inside, becoming part of herself: it's growing and changing, exciting her from the inside, as well as getting longer and warmer and firmer (it never gets fully rigid; it doesn't need to do that) in the part that extends outside her, as it grows to fill Kitty up. 

Illyana is where she wants to be, and she too feels safe: she’s holding, and being held, and rocking back and forth on top of her best friend, her person, her first partner on this Earth, and the swaying rhythms from the song they are no longer hearing (the phone’s silent now, on the floor) have become, instead, the rhythms of their connection, every nerve ending returning from the minor to the dominant to the tonic, not once but over and over, until Illyana feels herself on and in and around and all over and for and inside Kitty, all at once, with the focused totality of their passion. It's a thrusting, forwarding, commanding kind of passion, like riding something fierce, but better: a kind of erupting, a kind of becoming, as well as a kind of coming--

She takes short, sharp breaths, and then a very deep breath, at once out of control, and in so much control she wants to savor it forever, along with the woman she's still very much inside.

They stay on the floor for the length of a couple more songs they would have ignored if the songs were still playing, listening to the faint static on speakers still on the table, no longer connected to anything, listening to each other breathe.

Kitty thinks about how safe each one is able to let the other feel. About how many kinds of fun they have together. About how long it took for them to find this the first time—so many sleepover feelings, so many feelings that did not yet have names—and about how they were able to find it again. She thinks of that line from a poem she remembers reading, back when a lot of her feelings about how to kiss and how to hold and how to declare your affections were still learned from Elfquest, one of the first poems she read that spoke to her about how girls love other girls, about how that love might be different from other kinds. “Whatever happens, this is.” As it still is.

They lie there, one on top of the other, their weight carefully distributed for comfort, not quite dreaming, fully awake, just enjoying it, and then—taking a cue from the Shi’ar tech, which has split back into two separate harnesses, one per woman—Illyana disarticulates herself from Kitty, and Kitty stands up and leans on the back of a chair and looks around to make sure she hasn’t lost any of her delicate wirework—

and Kitty has trouble standing up, almost sits down involuntarily, and doesn’t know what’s going on, and then she does: Illyana must have picked the harness with the built-in controls, and now she’s got a not-quite-wicked grin on her face—of course she would—as she sends Kitty’s thighs into action again. Back and forth, back and forth, and then suddenly there's something flowing out from far inside, and Kitty feels like somebody has turned on the jets of a swimming pool inside her, because for the third time she’s coming, but this time in a very different mode; this time the silver harness and her own body parts have decided that she’s going to soak herself through. 

She’s come like this before, but not for a while, and not without the particular hydraulic—and leaky—technology that Illyana has wisely, wonderfully, surprisingly, chosen to engage. There’s selfless ecstasy in Kitty’s eyes, and they close, and she opens them again to see and feel warm water running down her thighs, her knees, her calves, into her bunched-up leggings, between her toes. (Maybe the leggings are ruined. Kitty has more.) She feels opened up, opened out, fully exposed and very private, with her best friend, her Magik, right there, washed away and yet brought right back to where they were standing, beloved, as if under very warm rain.

To be clear, it's not really raining. That’s just how she feels. When the imaginary rain dissipates—when Kitty stops coming, again—Illyana is holding her, and then they are holding each other, and there’s a long, quiet kiss.

That, Kitty thinks, was worth waiting for. Worth waiting all day. Worth years: years of helping pick out what to wear, like the songs says; years of feeling close but not as close as she wanted to be. Years in which one or the other woman—but not both at once, not in the same place and same time—kept imagining their bodies together. 

“Come on let’s sleep in my bed,” Hayley Kiyoko is singing. not from the speaker but from the re-started xPhone. “At least I’ve got you in my head,” and the bass line undulates again, just as it did before the song suddenly stopped, and then, as Kitty and Illyana both look down to see why the song has re-started, they see why: amid the wires running out the back of the phone, there’s a kind of bean-shaped, silvery head, bouncing up and down amid the microcircuitry.

“Eep!” the head says. “Golly!”

Illyana just stares. “Widget!” Kitty says. “You mischief-maker.”

“Has this thing been spying on us?” Magik says. It’s not like she minds being seen, or ever has, but she doesn’t like the idea that she doesn’t know who’s watching, or even recording; she always wants to know what's going on. Also Illyana may know Widget only by hearsay; she wasn’t around for most of Widget’s adventures, if adventure is the right word. (Caper, maybe.)

“Not exactly,” Kitty says. “Because you can't spy on your self. I mean, Widget—this is a kind of future robot version of part of me that’s going to know our history, and our alternate histories and—oh, I mean, it’s—“

“It’s complicated?” Illyana says, scowling and then grinning again, as she realizes that she’s still in control; whatever the silver weird head does or doesn’t mean, she can defend Kitty from it if it’s a danger, and she can, also, embarrass Kitty, and send her into any of several levels of ectasy, whenever she wants, because Illyana is still wearing the single harness that has the controls.

“Widget is cybernetic mischievous future me from another Earth," Kitty explains. "Sometimes Widget knows what I know; sometimes it seems like Widget knows what I know before I know it, or else she can read my friends' minds. Sometimes it's like she's trying to put me into the story that would be good for me, which doesn't mean we-- I-- she-- Widget gets it right."

"Widget, I didn’t know you could be such a good DJ!” Kitty strokes the robot head with one finger, realizing only afterwards that this particular finger is wet from before.

“What?” says Magik.

“I was trying,” Kitty says, “to set up an xPhone so that it could recognize any of us from another dimension, and receive emergency calls. Not just from Limbo but from the other Earths where our friends have been known to get stuck.”

“Good idea,” Illyana says, gently sweeping her emergent tail. (It’s just emerged, just now.)

“But it turns out if you tune the phone to anyone’s consciousness, in order to pick up that consciousness through alternate dimensions, you can attract that person’s alternate selves. In this case, that meant I was sharing my phone with Widget, who seems to have wanted to make us a playlist?”

Widget’s head bobs and nods. “Eep!” the robot exclaims, happily, blinking its frog eyes. “Gleep!”

“Basically, future alternate me made a playlist for our present selves.”

“A present from our future to our present,” Illyana says, “with songs about our past.”

“I could open that present,” Kitty says.

"Open with care."

"Do not bend or fold."

"Includes shipping and handling."

"Slippery when wet."

Illyana opens her mouth and then closes it, as if she were looking around for a joke about open-endedness, or about opening up.

Kitty, meanwhile, is looking around for that towel she left on the tiles. But her partner won’t let her; instead, there’s that harness, shifting around Kitty’s hips as Illyana shifts her stance to free up her lengthening tail.

“Are you going where I think you’ve going?” Kitty asks her friend, or rather asks her friend’s tail, as if its sensitive tip had a mind of its own.

The tip slides up between Kitty’s thighs as Kitty sits down again, hard, on the towel she was looking for, moving her own hands so as to guide the tail into the space that has opened inside the silver harness that’s still very much engaged, tightly, around Kitty’s hips.

“Oh,” Kitty says, massaging the tail below the tip.

“At least I got you in my head,” the song goes, and then cuts out again, as Illyana nudges the phone itself, and the robot head on top of it, into a corner and out of the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hayley Kiyoko, "What I Need": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YynKelHGhNc
> 
> Hayley Kiyoko, "Sleepover": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw
> 
> Neither video has much to do with the stories in chapters five and six, but the videos are likely the best/ most accessible way to hear the songs.
> 
> As always, please let me know if there's anything in here that doesn't make sense to you, or doesn't fit X-canon!


End file.
